Adobe wants me to rent Photoshop now. Officially announced last week alongside the rest of Creative Suite 6, this whole "Creative Cloud" thing where instead of buying the software outright you just pay a monthly fee forever and ever, amen. Something like fifty bucks a month if you sign up for a year, more like seventy five if you want to bail whenever you feel like it. Forever. Not once, not "buy it and upgrade every couple years when you feel like it," but every single month for as long as you want to open the program.
I get why theyre doing it. Recurring revenue is the dream for any software company, Ive read enough startup blogs to know that much. But Ive got a copy of CS5 sitting on this machine that I paid for in a lump sum back when I still had a "real" freelance design gig, and the idea that in a year or two that copy is going to feel like a relic because everyone else moved to the cloud version kind of bugs me. Im not against subscriptions in general, I pay for Dropbox, I pay for Netflix (well, my roommate pays and I mooch, dont tell anyone). But there's something different about creative tools you use for actual paid work. If I stop paying Adobe one month because things are tight, do I just lose access to the files I made with their software? That part still isnt totally clear to me and it makes me uneasy.
Anyway, thats not even really what I sat down to write about, its just been rattling around in my head since I read about it Monday.
The bigger story this week, at least to me, is this whole Justice Department lawsuit against Apple and a pile of the big publishers over ebook pricing. The claim is basically that Apple and five publishers got together and fixed prices so that ebooks couldnt undercut what Amazon was charging, which is a pretty wild thing to allege against a company that spent the last decade being the "we just make nice hardware" guy. Three of the publishers apparently settled already rather than fight it. I dont know enough about antitrust law to have a real legal opinion here but as someone who buys a fair number of Kindle books, Ive definitely noticed prices creeping toward that $12.99-$14.99 range on stuff that used to be $9.99, and now I guess I know why, or at least have a theory why. Whether thats good or bad for readers long term is above my pay grade. Cheaper books now, sure, but Amazon undercutting everyone until theyre the only game left standing isnt exactly a comforting outcome either.
And then theres the Greenpeace people standing outside Microsoft and Amazons offices with signs about coal power. Their report on "dirty" cloud computing came out a couple weeks back and apparently theyre following it up with actual protests now, which, fine, I guess thats the natural next step. I dont have strong feelings about this one honestly, mostly i just think its funny that "the cloud" sounds so weightless and abstract and then it turns out its a warehouse full of servers somewhere in North Carolina running on whatever the local power grid happens to burn. Every time I upload a photo to whatever service Im using that week Im apparently contributing a tiny sliver to a coal plant's workload. Cheerful thought for a Saturday morning.
None of this is really connected except that it all happened in the same seven or eight days and I read about all of it while procrastinating instead of doing actual client work. Thats basically how I consume tech news at this point, in these little bursts between real tasks, half paying attention, forming half-baked opinions I then type out here at midnight. My actual work today involved fighting with a WordPress theme for a client who insists on having a sidebar widget that autoplays music, which I have tried, gently, to talk her out of, and failed. Some battles you just dont win.
Still on CS5 for now. Might hold out a while longer just to see how the whole Creative Cloud thing shakes out before I commit to renting my software instead of owning it. Feels like the kind of decision that's easy to regret either way.